System Backup And Restore

OK, I switched from Windows 7 to Manjaro 18 in January, then the 19.0.1 update wrecked my install and I moved on to Tumbleweed around March, now after a couple of months on it I haven’t had any issues at all, rock solid, and so I’d like to be able to backup and in case of need restore my system, but I dunno how to go about it.

On Windows I’ve always used Acronis True Image, but with OpenSUSE I’ve got Btrfs which should provide similar functionality to ZFS’s boot environments, right?

Or is ReaR the way to go?

I’m a former Windows power user and a present Linux noob willing to learn, please steer me in the right direction, thanks.

If you have btrfs and snapshots enabled, you can always rollback in case of trouble.

I have some stuff on separate partitions and mounted in the proper place ( f.e. /var/lib/mysql , /srv/ ), and backup those using rsync and an external drive. My (almost) entire /home/knurpht gets synced to my Nextcloud.
Quite some people here use Clonezilla to backup / restore / move their system.

This sounds interesting as I’d like to experiment a bit with configs and apps, but I only have root on Btrfs, aren’t personal application settings saved in home?
In any case, is it better handled via terminal or GUI please? A link to a wiki or QRG would be appreciated, thanks.

I keep all my staff (docs, pics, music, vids, etc.) on a NAS so there’s nothing I need backed up from any notebook or PC, thank you.

I assume it’s a bare metal backup/restore solution, I’ll look into it, thanks, as I’d like to keep on doing some measure of distro hopping, even if I’ll stick with Tumbleweed.

Yes, they’re. Whether /home is a separate partition, or a btrfs subvolume, it is unaffected by rolling back the / (root) subvolume. Only snapshots for / (root) are configured by default. This serves the purpose of reverting a messed up system upgrade.

You can place /home on a separate subvolume on the same btrfs partition where / is located, and configure to take periodic/manual snapshots. Then you’ll be able to revert to a previous version of your application settings. It would also revert any other data changed between snapshots, but you can remedy with yet another subvolume, git repository, etc. You’ll certainly find an appropriate setup for that if needed.

It’s handled in two steps:

  1. Start the computer, select “Start bootloader from a read-only snapshot”, pick a previous snapshot;
  2. After system finished bootup, run from terminal “sudo snapper rollback”.

See: https://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/leap/reference/html/book.opensuse.reference/cha-snapper.html#sec-snapper-snapshot-boot